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Pakistani Militant Chief Is Reported Dead

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — One of Pakistan’s most wanted militant commanders, Ilyas Kashmiri, was killed in an American drone strike in the tribal territory of South Waziristan, residents and a militant active in the area said Saturday. But Pakistani and American officials cautioned that they had not been able to confirm his death.

Mr. Kashmiri is considered one of the most dangerous and highly trained Pakistani militants allied with Al Qaeda. A former member of Pakistan’s special forces, the Special Services Group, Mr. Kashmiri was suspected of being behind several attacks, including the May 22 battle at the Mehran naval base in the southern port city of Karachi that deeply embarrassed Pakistani officials. He has also been implicated in the terrorist attack on Mumbai, India, in 2008, in which at least 163 people were killed, including some American citizens.

He was reported to have been killed Friday in a strike on a compound in Laman, near Wana, the main town of South Waziristan. Atifur Rehman, a senior government official in Wana, said the strike killed nine people. Mr. Rehman said there had been reports that Mr. Kashmiri had recently set up operations in Laman, and that a sharp increase in drone flights over the area had been noticed in the past few days.

A known Taliban militant in Wana contacted by telephone confirmed that Mr. Kashmiri had been killed. But an intelligence official in the capital, Islamabad, speaking on condition of anonymity, said he had not received any independent confirmations of the report. And American officials — who cautioned that previous reports of Mr. Kashmiri’s death had turned out to be false, including a Pakistani claim he had died in a drone strike in September 2009 — said they were trying to confirm the new reports on Saturday morning.

Mr. Kashmiri’s death would certainly be welcomed by both American and Pakistani intelligence agencies, and could go some way to alleviating the strained relations between the two countries that have developed in recent months, in particular since the May 2 raid that killed Osama bin Laden 75 miles from Islamabad. Pakistan has accused the United States of pursuing its own agenda in Pakistan without coordinating with Pakistani security forces, running its own intelligence agents and conducting unilateral strikes that ride roughshod over Pakistan’s sovereignty.

Photo

Ilyas KashmiriCredit
Saeed Khan/Agence France-Presse -- Getty Images

The United States has sent three high-level delegations to Islamabad in recent weeks, the last one led by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, to try to repair relations. Mrs. Clinton said the United States was looking for specific actions from Pakistan in coming days and weeks, including intelligence sharing, which had all but broken down.

Mr. Kashmiri was wanted by both countries and could have been a good target for renewed intelligence sharing. He is reported to lead a unit called the 313 brigade, and belongs to the group Harkat-ul-Jehad-e-Islami, which is suspected of a number of high-profile attacks, including an attack against the army headquarters in Rawalpindi, the garrison city next to Islamabad.

The attack on the navy base in Karachi, conducted by half a dozen commando militants, lasted 16 hours before security forces regained control of the base.

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Mr. Kashmiri, 45, has a long history of waging guerrilla operations. As a Pakistani Army trainer of Afghan mujahedeen fighters, he lost an eye battling Russian forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Later, while working with Kashmiri militants attacking India, Pakistan’s archrival, he earned renown in Pakistan after escaping from an Indian jail where he had been imprisoned for two years. But he turned against the state when President Pervez Musharraf banned his group after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He was arrested four years later in connection with an attempted assassination of Mr. Musharraf in December 2003, but released because of a lack of evidence.

Mr. Kashmiri was indicted in 2009 along with two Chicago men accused of plotting an attack against a Danish newspaper that had printed a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad. One of the men, David Coleman Headley, testified recently at the Chicago trial of the other man, Tahawwur Rana, that Mr. Kashmiri, angered by the American campaign of drone strikes, had asked him to research possibilities for attacking the defense contractor Lockheed Martin in retaliation.

After the Pakistani government laid siege to Islamic militants in the Red Mosque in Islamabad in July 2007, Mr. Kashmiri moved his operations to North Waziristan and took up arms with Al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban there. He is listed as the fourth-most wanted man by the Interior Ministry, according to Pakistani media reports.

American intelligence and counterterrorism officials say Mr. Kashmiri is among the most dangerous militant leaders in Pakistan today because of his training skills, commando experience and strategic vision to carry out attacks against Western targets.

Reporting was contributed by Ismail Khan from Peshawar, Pakistan, and Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on June 5, 2011, on Page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Militant Commander in Pakistan Is Reported Killed by U.S. Drone Strike. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe